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"FacebookPinterest\n\n So it\u2019s been a month...wait, no, it\u2019s been two months, and from the silence roaring suddenly out of Geneva one has to assume that physicists are still\u2014still\u2014trying to figure out if the subatomic particle lately glimpsed by the Large Hadron Collider really is the elusive &amp;quot;Higgs Boson&amp;quot; they\u2019ve been hunting for half a century. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the ABBA-looking dude who runs the Conseil Europ\u00E9ene pour la Recherche Nucl\u00E9aire, which built and maintains the LHC, was only comfortable saying in his July 4th press-conference that the new particle exhibits &amp;quot;Higgs-like&amp;quot; properties, but more research is needed\u2014years of it, to be specific\u2014before we\u2019ll know for certain that this is the submicroscopic speck that\u2019s famously not actually known as &amp;quot;The God Particle.&amp;quot;\n\n Given that no one so much as threw a shoe at Heuer during his maddening announcement, and that CERN\u2019s facilities remain untorched, even unvandalized, two months later, what it is not too soon to say, however, is that physics would appear to have gotten away with it: a decades-long campaign of hype, propaganda, and outright deception that saw a ragtag bunch of social misfits swindle the world out of billions of dollars, monies which as of this writing have not been returned. What follows is the story, if not of an outright hoax, then at least of the most audacious and effective PR campaign in the history of science. Our tale begins in the early 1990s. A young George Bush Sr. is in the White House. The music world has been turned on its head for only the eighty-third time by an angry young man singing songs about being angry and young. In tennis, a young...\n\n Oh, actually, fuck it. Let\u2019s go all the way back.\n\n\n\n In 1969, appearing before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a physicist named Robert Wilson was asked by one Senator John Pastore how exactly the fancy particle &amp;quot;accelerator&amp;quot; he wanted $250 million to build was going to enhance U.S. national security, it being the height of the Cold War and everything. Pastore\u2019s question was a little mean. You\u2019re not supposed to ask a physicist what the point of his work is, any more than you\u2019re supposed to inform a mime that it really isn\u2019t that windy. But Wilson rose to the occasion. Indeed, his reply probably ranks among the Top Five Most Boffo Comebacks in the whole history of congressional testimony, the kind of thing they show on looped rotation at the C-SPANZone in Times Square for tourists to stare at in silence over their nonpartisantinis.\n\n &amp;quot;It has nothing to do directly with defending our country,&amp;quot; Wilson admitted, hunching down into his gooseneck microphone the way you do. &amp;quot;Except to help make it worth defending.&amp;quot; \n\n Shpladow. With those seven perfect words, Wilson not only got his funding but solved a practical conundrum that had bedeviled subatomic physics since the field\u2019s inception at the start of the twentieth century: how to extract incredible shitloads of money out of people with no hope of ever understanding why you need it. Prior to Wilson, supplicant physicists had made the mistake of trying to explain themselves. In airless committee rooms, before panels of orange-skinned creationists hard up against their nap times, they had ventured into the mysteries of the wave-particle duality... tried to give some sense of just how exciting it would be to finally see the quarks inside a proton... and came away empty-handed. Others had made a practical pitch for why they needed the money. It was near impossible, they\u2019d argue, to build a cutting-edge particle accelerator without at some point having to develop a new diode, or superconducting transistor, or a new method for threading lots of wires through a single tube, and so, you know... give me half a billion dollars and maybe that\u2019ll happen. Robert Wilson\u2019s stroke of genius, in that moment, was to say fuck all that. Rather than explaining particle physics or trying to sweep its inexplicability under the rug, Wilson seized all the weirdness, abstraction, and complexity of the field in his hands and balloon-animaled it into a patriotic virtue. This shit is so impractical and hard\u2014ran the core of his argument\u2014its payoffs so far away and uncertain, that there\u2019s not another nation on the planet that would dream of spending a dollar on it, let alone the nine blundred quintillion dollars I\u2019m here to ask from you today.\n\n It was an approach that worked brilliantly, right up until it didn\u2019t. In 1987, no less orange-skinned a creationist than President Ronald Reagan was persuaded to support something called the Superconducting Super Collider, a $4.4 billion, fifty-four-mile-long behemoth that would have seen physics comfortably into the twenty-first century. Construction duly began outside Waxahachie, Texas, but then in 1993, with the projected budget now swollen to $11 billion and amid reports that the SSC\u2019s design team had blown $56,000 on potted &amp;quot;tropical&amp;quot; plants and a further $24,000 on two massive Christmas parties, Congress pulled the plug, leaving fifteen miles of purpose-built accelerator tunnel to crumble and crack in the Texas sun like the rodeo dreams of an area farmhand or the freckle-dusted beauty of the waitress who loves him.\n\n The SSC\u2019s scrapping really left a mark, emotionally, on the global physics community. Many had just spent a whole chapter of their working lives either building it or writing papers about what it might find, and now all of that work was for naught. Perhaps worst of all: The SSC\u2019s budget ended up going to fund something called the International Space Station, a sexy, crowd-pleasing bimbo of a project with only a fig leaf of scientific purpose. Whereas the SSC had been due to probe reality at its deepest level, tackling such nontrivial questions as &amp;quot;What is stuff made of?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Why does anything exist?,&amp;quot; the basic mission of the ISS seemed to be to give U.S. taxpayers the thrill of living in science-fictiony Future Times\u2014you know, like with space stations!\u2014as well, presumably, as breaking down every now and again, requiring dramatic televised rescues by stubbled heroes of few words.\n\n It was a kick in the face, was what it was, the scrapping of the SSC, but you don\u2019t make it through physics grad school without learning how to learn a lesson. Although what follows is pure speculation, it seems pretty clear that after a period of retrenchment and wound licking, the tight-knit global fraternity of particle physicists got back to its feet, dusted itself off, and either figuratively or actually swore a pact that one way or another, by hook or by crook, this was not going to happen again. Next time they had a shot at building a major-league accelerator\u2014and by criminy, there was going to be a next time\u2014the project would not be left hostage to the whims of politicians. Next time, somehow, the public would be brought on board. Cabdrivers, barbers, waitresses, people\u2019s mothers... literally everyone would be made to appreciate that the Great Machine under construction was every bit as glamorous and future-y as some chintzy two-toilet space station, and that riding on its success or failure were epic stakes rivaling those of the most summery and blockbusting of Hollywood summer blockbusters.\n\n Oh, and they would be made to appreciate these things\u2014and here was the great game-changing innovation\u2014even it if none of them were true.\n\n\n\n There\u2019s nothing wrong with the coffee machines at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. They don\u2019t look like much from the outside\u2014well, they look like ordinary low-rent coffee-vending machines\u2014but should you happen to sidle up to one of them and fumble into it any of the tiny lightweight foreign coins, a soft deposit of which has now accumulated along the seam of your right rear trouser pocket, then magical things will start to happen. Not immediately. Nothing at all will happen immediately. But then, just as you\u2019re starting to wonder if perhaps the machine would like another coin, there comes this noise... a great churning, aspirated sort of noise like something ancient clearing its throat... and from somewhere deep in its innards the machine will hawk up into its vending chamber a little brown plastic cup containing not only (a) a stout plastic swizzle stick, already in there magically somehow, but also (b) a hot portion of the oiliest, most flavorsome, and frankly strongest liquid rocket fuel you\u2019ve ever tasted. Three or four of them little coffees, I was able to ascertain on a press trip to the Large Hadron Collier, and for a period of up to twenty minutes things are fine. The tedium lifts. The clouds of ennui part. The dingy corridors of CERN seem to glitter and seethe with all the whizzing subatomic doodads that all the people in all the offices are always talking about... . But then it wears off and things aren\u2019t fine again. Things aren\u2019t fine again at all.\n\n See, like everyone else who reads the newspaper and watches the television, I had formed the impression over the preceding decade that there was something exciting happening there in the ground beneath the Swiss-French border. A giant machine was under construction, I had been led to believe\u2014indeed, the largest, most complex, and most powerful machine that mankind would ever have built. Once the machine was finished and switched on, according to media reports, it would consume as much electricity as the entire neighboring metropolis of Geneva and use it to slam &amp;quot;protons&amp;quot; together with sufficient force to manufacture black holes, cause explosions hotter than core of the sun, and re-create the Big Bang so that this time scientists could watch and take notes. The risks of the projects were negligible, they assured us. Negligible but extremely cool. Among the various things that almost certainly wouldn\u2019t happen were the planet being eaten by a black hole, time itself starting to run backwards, the whole universe being canceled out by the sudden hernia-like intrusion of some kind of anti-universe... It was all very thrilling. These were the kinds of apocalyptic fates that previously only the lantern-jawed heroes of comic-book-based films had been able to save the world from, narrowly. Now here they were about to not quite happen in real life!\n\n Oh, and it got better. The stated purpose of building this giant Doomsday Machine in the ground outside Geneva was to hunt an elusive and unimaginably tiny particle called &amp;quot;the Higgs.&amp;quot; As with the Holy Grail or the Loch Ness Monster, people had been searching for the Higgs for a very long time, apparently, and as with the Ark of the Covenant, it was thought to contain the Answers to Everything. Finding the Higgs, they told us, would answer the question of why there is mass in the universe, why anything and everything has substance and exists, hence its controversial nickname, &amp;quot;the God Particle.&amp;quot; The actual physics of it was laughably beyond the reach of anyone first learning about the Higgs in a newspaper or from the TV, but it didn\u2019t matter. Just as you don\u2019t need to know what\u2019s glowing inside Ving Rhames\u2019s briefcase to enjoy Pulp Fiction, you didn\u2019t need to know what the Higgs boson actually was to become invested in humanity\u2019s efforts to find it.\n\n This reporter didn\u2019t, anyway. I\u2019m a sucker for epic quests of any description, and as a consequence it was in a state of both childlike and childish excitement that I arrived to take the LHC\u2019s measure for myself.\n\n The excitement didn\u2019t last very long. CERN\u2019s sprawling campus outside Geneva looks and smells like it hasn\u2019t been painted or even mopped since about 1979 and is generally not a very glamorous place. Physicists dress like shit, for one thing, as if they\u2019ve galloped straight through a Walmart on a mighty steed, haphazardly spearing T-shirts and sweatpants from the racks with a heavy lance and spend their days performing dull, repetitive tasks that would chap the ass of a Foxconn worker to the bone. Entering any of the dozen or so control rooms dotting the LHC\u2019s vast, drab circumference, one can almost literally hear the layers of stratified boredom crunching beneath one\u2019s feet, and smell the stale yawns of 10,000 graveyard shifts, like a whiff of gangrene and gunpowder on an old Civil War battlefield.\n\n And fair enough, I remember thinking, after one long morning in a control room watching the Large Hadron Collider slowly ramp itself up to collision velocity... then slowly ramp itself down again just to prove that it could. The wholesale absence of cheap thrills in physics only went to show that something important must be going on here. These were the smartest people in the world, after all. Each of them could, if he or she chose, be padding around a penthouse duplex in footie pajamas, running a hedge-fund empire from their iPhone while using the other hand to experiment with reverse-spherified squid-ink raviolini. But they weren\u2019t. Each of them was here instead, in the unlovely suburbs of Geneva, riding to work in a shitty Citro&amp;amp;#xEB;n1 and an &amp;quot;Abibas&amp;quot; T-shirt to spend the 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift staring at a screen and remaining mindful of the Post-it note\u2019s instruction to &amp;quot;Call Gary at home if there\u2019s a problem.&amp;quot; Much as some subatomic particles are never glimpsed directly, but have their existence deduced from the spray of lesser particles into which they decay, so the importance and urgency of the LHC\u2019s mission, I decided, could be inferred from these depressingly low ceilings and that guy over there\u2019s &amp;quot;Planet Mollywood&amp;quot; sweatshirt.\n\n I still think that\u2019s true, for the record. Witnessing the sheer drudgery of modern physics up close gave me a new respect for the field and the people who toil in it, and it\u2019s a respect that has endured.\n\n\n\n It turns out not to be actually all that large, for one thing, the Large Hadron2 Collider. The circular tunnel that houses it does measure some seventeen miles in circumference, yes, and should you choose to walk from one side to the other, as I did, you should allow at least two hours for the journey. But it\u2019s not as if for all that time you\u2019re stepping over cogs and machete\u2019ing your way through bushels of wiring. No, you\u2019re just walking through the outskirts of Geneva.\n\n But... but you\u2019re being a dick, I hear you say. I\u2019ve seen cross sections of the Large Hadron Collider, and it\u2019s both huge and very cool. It\u2019s like a... giant metal donut... the size of an apartment building... with all sorts of crazy... stuff all over it.\n\n Yeah. No, it isn\u2019t. I know the photos you\u2019re talking about. For a good few years there, pretty much every magazine article about the LHC came illustrated with the same gorgeous splash-page photo of a humongous metal donut dripping with supercooled pipes and arrays of colored magnets, a few tiny human figures in white dust-suits taking readings from dials, and generally looking like the fucking Death Star at Christmas. Those donut-shaped contraptions do exist. I\u2019ve seen them with my own eyes, but they are not the Large Hadron Collider. Those things are the particle detectors, a.k.a. &amp;quot;the experiments,&amp;quot; and while they are indeed on the huge side (though this is simply so they can track the path of flying particles over a greater distance, not because they\u2019re applying or containing any of the terrifying cosmic forces you may have heard about), there are only four of them, taking up approximately zero percent of the Collider\u2019s vast circumference. For the remaining roughly 100 percent of those seventeen miles, the Large Hadron Collider is just a pipe, a boring-looking pipe, maybe two feet across, lying in a boring-looking tunnel. Ceci est une pipe, Ren\u00E9 Magritte would probably have remarked, hiding a yawn behind his fist, had you somehow convinced him to take a break from his exciting life making dorm-room art to come take a look at some science thing in a tunnel.\n\n\n\n 1. Oh sweet Krishna the fucking cars these people drive. At one point just before dawn, during a break waiting for something dull to happen, I blundered my way outside...only to be startled awake by the blinding shittiness of the vehicles parked there. Even adjusting for this being Europe, it was a woeful scene. Row upon row of frail, rusting hulks formerly held together with thick lead paint in the depression pastels of Alpine lobotomy clinics, now duct-taped and bungee-corded to within spitting distance\u2014most of it incoming, I rather fear\u2014of being roadworthy. I\u2019m no sheltered little violet, reader. I\u2019ve been around the block and seen things. I am aware, for instance, that sometimes when a man is down on his luck, he will substitute a bent coat hanger for his broken radio antenna while he sources a low after-market spare. Not before the CERN parking lot, though, had I seen a bent coat-hanger filling in for a steering-wheel\u2014though I could have been mistaken; the Saran Wrap of the windshield was doing strange things with the light.\n\n 2. I\u2019ve had it confirmed to me by Nobel laureates that even at the very highest levels of physics the only way anyone ever types the word &amp;quot;hadron&amp;quot; is with the ten-keystroke sequence: H; A; R; D; Backspace; Backspace; D; R; O; N. It seems that\u2019s just how we\u2019re wired, we people.\n\n Now, do not mistake me. That tunnel itself really is quite something, and charges of dickitude might fairly be leveled if one didn\u2019t doff one\u2019s cap even slightly to the men who dug it. Five years it took them, which isn\u2019t bad at all when you factor in that the thing had to be seventeen miles long, buried 300 feet underground, and pass, in a millimetrically perfect circle, beneath the city of Geneva with all its plumbing and shit. Impressive stuff, no question about it, and one might even be tempted to argue that on the strength of its containing tunnel alone, the LHC deserves its frequent mentions as the glittering pinnacle to date of man\u2019s prowess in the art of making stuff... .\n\n But that temptation is to be resisted, because it turns out they didn\u2019t dig the tunnel for the Large Hadron Collider. Mere hours after my arrival in Geneva, slurping my first of them little coffees from the machine while exploring the underlit CERN visitors center, I gleaned from a backlit Perspex info poster that the LHC\u2019s famous tunnel was excavated back between 1983 and 1988 to house a different particle accelerator, an identically huge machine known as the &amp;quot;Large Electron-Positron collider,&amp;quot; a.k.a. the LEP.\n\n What happened to the LEP? Why didn\u2019t it get built? That was my question, too, and the answer, I was shocked to learn, is that nothing happened to it. It did get built. Not only did it get built, but the goddamn thing fucking ran, perfectly happily, doing almost exactly what the LHC is doing now, for eleven productive years, from 1989 to 2000. If people like you and me and have never heard of the LEP, that\u2019s only because it was designed and built before the traumatic axing of the SSC and before physics, in a panic, decided to start selling particle-hunting to the general public like it was a goddamn monster-truck event.\n\n As for the vaunted power of the LHC, that too turned out to be mainly hype. Yes, pound for pound the energy released by the collision of two protons can rival the intensity of the Big Bang or be hotter than the core of the sun, but that\u2019s because it\u2019s all squeezed down to a tiny point. What that energy also turns out to be equal to, however, in absolute terms, is the energy released by the head-on collision of a few mosquitoes flying into each other, nonfatally, at normal mosquito flying speed. &amp;quot;Wow,&amp;quot; I said to the tour guide who told me this, and yeah, I think I probably did look a bit disappointed. &amp;quot;That\u2019s not very much.&amp;quot;\n\n &amp;quot;Yes, it is,&amp;quot; she said, nodding at me in an encouraging way. &amp;quot;It really is.&amp;quot;\n\n Here\u2019s the thing, though: It actually isn\u2019t. It really isn\u2019t very much energy at all. And in regard to the dodgy proposition that the LHC running at full steam consumes as much electricity as the entire city of Geneva, which was almost certainly media hype rather than actual science to begin with, I would urge you first to spend a Friday evening in that desolate metropolis, feeling your way about its darkened streets in search of warm food and entertainment, before you decide how impressed you\u2019re going to be by that.\n\n\n\n Which brings me, finally, to the fucking Higgs boson. Where to begin with this fucking thing.\n\n It came as news to me, for starters, I have to say, there on the ground in Geneva, that the act of finding the Higgs, if it did occur, would be quite as drawn-out and tedious as it turned out to be. Early on in my visit, I happened to ask a CERN person what the odds were of them finding the Higgs, you know, while I was there, and after laughing literally in my face, the guy informed me that it didn\u2019t work like that. If they ever even did find the Higgs, he told me, there would be no exciting Moment of Discovery. No ponytailed hottie on the graveyard shift was going to glance at her screen mid-yawn and drop her Red Bull in recognition. No craggy Michael Caine-ish administrator would answer the phone at 4 a.m., then grapple for his spectacles and sit bolt upright as Susan Sarandon, here in the role of his wife, croaked, &amp;quot;Darling, what is it?&amp;quot; in her frilly camisole. No, if the Higgs were ever found, the man told me, it was going to happen with pulse-retarding slowness as data points steadily accrued upon a graph and a committee inched its way around to holding the kind of low-key gingerly press conference we saw last month. If in fact a film were ever made about the Finding of the Higgs, the man concluded\u2014and I\u2019m paraphrasing here\u2014Michael Bay would not necessarily be one\u2019s first choice of director, despite all the explosions and mega-engineering involved. Indeed, that honor might fall more naturally into the lap of Michael motherfucking Leigh.\n\n Dispirited by this news, I retreated to my hotel room with a bottle of bubble bath, one of Chivas Regal, and a sack of physics textbooks to try and get my head a little further around it. What I learned there would underwhelm me, underwhelm me to my very core, though explaining why is going to require some actual physics.\n\n There is a common misconception that supercolliders like the LHC find particles by smashing things apart, the same way you might hurl a friend\u2019s watch at the wall to see what\u2019s inside it. This did use to be the case back in the early days, when we were still trying to see what, if anything, was inside an atom, but we are way beyond that now. A modern accelerator like the LHC makes particles out of thin air, which it can do because air\u2014or even empty space\u2014isn\u2019t as thin as it appears. See, the universe turns out to be filled with a number of invisible &amp;quot;fields,&amp;quot; like vast three-dimensional bedsheets stretching from one end of space to the other, and just as you can make a wrinkle in a bedsheet by flicking it with your fingernail, you can make a field temporarily thicken into a particle by hitting it with a very intense explosion. Why would you bother doing that? For two reasons: one, to prove that the field exists; two, to find out what the field is like. Just as the depth and shake of the wrinkle you make by flicking a bedsheet can tell you whether the sheet is made of rubber, satin, or even sateen, so the shape and the size of a subatomic particle can tell you a lot about the field of which it is sort of a part.\n\n Since about 1940 or so, this is what physicists have been doing, essentially: building ever larger mechanical fingers with which to flick harder and harder at the great tangle of invisible sheets that surrounds us, and since about 1960 or so a consensus has gradually formed as to how many different sheets there are, how they\u2019re wrapped, and what they\u2019re made of, etc. That theory is called &amp;quot;the Standard Model,&amp;quot; and one part of it was supplied in 1964 by a guy called Peter Higgs. Prior to \u201964, it had been observed, as it were, that while several of the tangled bedsheets making up our reality behaved in some respects like a very thin lightweight fabric\u2014gossamer, say\u2014the wrinkles produced in them by our flicking were much shallower than they should have been, as if the sheets were actually made of something heavier. Higgs\u2019s suggestion\u2014again, as it were\u2014was that lying just beyond the sheets, there might be a blanket, causing the sheets not to dent so deeply when we flicked them. Oh yeah, said people in the physics community. That might be it, and a new era of even harder flicking began, in hopes of putting a dent in the blanket itself, thus proving it existed and that the Standard Model\u2019s theory of what the other sheets were made of and how they were tangled was correct.\n\n Flash forward to 2009, however, and we find Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, playing a hot lady physicist in Ron Howard\u2019s appalling Angels Demons, trying to explain the Higgs to Tom Hanks and a roomful of skeptical Vatican officials. She and her colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider are &amp;quot;studying the origins of the universe, to try to isolate what some people call \u2019the God Particle.\u2019 &amp;quot;\n\n &amp;quot;Gott... Particle?&amp;quot; sneers Stellan Skarsg&amp;amp;#xE5;rd, visibly shaken at finding himself in a film even worse than Mamma Mia!\n\n &amp;quot;What we call it isn\u2019t important,&amp;quot; says Zurer with a dismissive swish of her hot hair. &amp;quot;It\u2019s what gives all matter mass. The thing without which we could not exist.&amp;quot;\n\n Films are generally pretty slapdash when it comes to science, but not in this case. Zurer\u2019s little speech could have lifted almost verbatim from the science pages of any reputable newspaper over the last decade or so, or from the Associated Press, which as recently as last month hailed the Higgs as &amp;quot;the key to understanding why matter has mass.&amp;quot;\n\n And the thing is this: It just isn\u2019t true. If I read those physics textbooks correctly, the Higgs field doesn\u2019t give every fundamental particle its mass, just some of them. Indeed, from the moment Peter Higgs first proposed the field in 1964, to the nonmoment they almost-confirmed its existence over the past year, it has never been thought to account for more than 1 percent of all the mass in the universe. That\u2019s right. One percent, which any mathematician can tell you is just not very much. Yes, it may be thought of as a blanket mid up in the tangle of sheets that surrounds us, but it\u2019s only mid up with some of the sheets. It isn\u2019t some ultimate Counterpane of Reality, as we\u2019d rather been led to believe. Is it &amp;quot;the thing without which we could not exist&amp;quot;? No, it is a thing without which we could not exist, and down at the subatomic level there\u2019s literally a buttload of them.\n\n No, the Higgs only became as famous as it did because physicists couldn\u2019t fucking find it. For half a century they were stymied by its nondiscovery, like a man attempting a crossword puzzle who, after some brisk early progress, finds himself hung up on a nine-letter word for a piece of cutlery beginning with F. The man becomes obsessed. The clue becomes his white whale. He racks his brain, ignores his wife, and in the evenings, drinking, tells sympathetic barmen that the fate of the entire puzzle hangs on his being able solve this one clue... which is sort of true, kinda... . But then, one day, he does solve it\u2014fishknife\u2014and readdressing the puzzle after a celebratory trip to the bathroom, he finds that fishknife has shed its mantle of grandeur and now it\u2019s the unsolved 80 percent of the puzzle that commands his attention, most urgently the five-letter word for a &amp;quot;tribal drum&amp;quot; descending from the central K of fishknife....\n\n As for the term &amp;quot;God Particle,&amp;quot; Ayelet Zurer\u2019s conflicted discomfort in Angels Demons was also very true to life. Some twenty minutes into the lo-fi churning of Prince\u2019s Black Album, a voice can be heard to mutter the words For someone who can\u2019t stand them TV dinners, you sure eat enough of them motherfuckers, and for some twenty years after the term\u2019s 1993 first appearance, as the title of a pop physics book by one Leon Ledermann, an eerily similar dynamic obtained between physicists and the term &amp;quot;the God Particle.&amp;quot; In interviews and press conferences, they were adamant and unanimous that they hated the term... yet somehow they never missed a chance to bring it up, if only to state again for the record, just one more time, how much they hated it.\n\n Which would have made a fiendish kind of sense, when you think about it, given the other efforts under way to amp up the sexiness of the quest for the Higgs by any means necessary. Scientists know what we think of them at this point, and they\u2019re smart enough, being scientists, to have figured out how to exploit that reputation for their own ends. They know as well as we do that when a scientist in a movie takes offense at someone\u2019s use of the term &amp;quot;time machine&amp;quot; and starts peeveishly adjusting his spectacles and explaining that it\u2019s not a time machine per se but actually blahbitty blahbitty quantum space dimensions blah, it means that not only has he invented a time machine, but it\u2019s a fucking good one. So it was with the so-called &amp;quot;so-called \u2019God Particle.\u2019 &amp;quot; The more we were told how loathed, how reviled, how detested the term was in the Corridors of Science, the more excited we shitheads in the lay community became. None of which is to suggest that physicists did like the term, I should stress. I think it\u2019s probably true, as Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample puts it in his book on the Higgs, that the particle\u2019s &amp;quot;grandiose&amp;quot; nickname is &amp;quot;one of the most, if not the most, derided in the history of physics, &amp;quot; and that &amp;quot;few things unite physicists more than their disdain for the name.&amp;quot; All I\u2019m suggesting is that maybe the term\u2019s value as a marketing tool did not go unnoticed by those in the know, and that maybe something of a double game was being played with it. I\u2019m sorry, what\u2019s that? You want the title of Mr. Sample\u2019s book so you can check that I\u2019ve rendered the preceding quotations accurately and not taken them out of context? Not a problemo. Published by Virgin Books at 320 pages, with an ISBN reference number of 0753522128, that would of course be Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle.3\n\n\n\n Anyway, it\u2019s all behind us now, by which I mean it\u2019s all, or almost all of it, still in front of us. The Higgs may have been, as we were endlessly told, the &amp;quot;final piece&amp;quot; of the Standard Model\u2019s puzzle, but what we were told somewhat less endlessly was that the Standard Model itself is really just one small, early piece of a bigger puzzle of huge but still unknown dimensions. The most deflating moment of my generally grim trip to Geneva was listening to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the ABBA-looking dude who made the Higgs announcement last month, coolly discussing CERN\u2019S plans for the next generation of gigantic particle accelerators. As Heuer spoke, I felt a tiny frown appear on my forehead, and glancing around the CERN media center, I observed the same tiny frown appearing on the foreheads of the other less-well-informed members of the global media. I\u2019m guessing that they, like me, had thought that, you know, this was it: that once the world\u2019s largest machine had found the last undiscovered particle, we\u2019d be getting out of the game, as it were, vis-&amp;amp;#xE0;-vis particles. Sure, there would be other mysteries to solve, other voyages of understanding upon which humanity would boldly embark... but surely we didn\u2019t know what those were yet. Could it really be possible that in ten, twenty, and a hundred years we\u2019d still be accelerating particles around circular tracks and smashing them together in search of yet more particles?\n\n Yes, it seems. That\u2019s exactly what we\u2019re going to do. Now that the Higgs has been found, the next order of business is to study its properties and then, based on our findings, begin the search for what\u2019s always described as an exciting &amp;quot;new family&amp;quot; of particles, those predicted by the theory of &amp;quot;supersymmetry.&amp;quot; Something like that anyway. Something involving finding more particles, and then even more particles after that.\n\n The big question, of course, is whether we the public are going to feel like paying for it. We\u2019re not as rich as we used to be, and it\u2019s by no means clear we have the emotional energy left to work ourselves into a lather again over another supposedly crucial particle, let alone a whole family of them. We could have sworn we just spent many billions of dollars building a Doomsday Machine so scientists could find the God Particle. Unless they can also discover a whole new family of superlatives to dazzle us with, some time is probably going to have to pass before we open our wallet that wide again.\n\n Then again, maybe not as much time as all that. The world has changed quite a lot, frankly, since 1969, when Robert Wilson shattered the backboard up on Capitol Hill. The world has changed quite a lot even since the early 1990s, when the mighty avalanche of hype and bullshit about the Large Hadron Collider first started to rumble. The world is faster now than it used to be, as well as weirder and more confusing, and while, yes, I know you can find that precise sentiment expressed on cave walls in the Great Rift Valley and slabs of cuneiform in the British Museum, as well as in every single novel written by a sensitive man between 1914 and the present day, it happens to be true, now, in a way that it didn\u2019t used to be. The once unpicturable abstractions of quantum physics, things entangling over distance, blinking in and out of existence for no apparent or even actual reason... they don\u2019t seem so abstract anymore. The news that we ourselves exist briefly in a boundaryless soup of invisible entities, ourselves gigantic specks of nothingness, flickering and excruciated between sickening infinities of scale... it no longer feels so much like news. Reality is a seething mess, we\u2019ve come to appreciate, if not quite yet to accept, and what was formerly the banality of being alive, of drawing breath, of our effortless navigation from one moment to the next, has lately come to feel every bit as weird and wondrous and dizzying as physicists and the makers of trippy short animated films always insisted it was.\n\n Indeed, if I can revive and extend an earlier analogy, I would submit that our general confusion has now deepened to the point that we really do feel, all of us collectively, like a man coming to after a blackout to find his head wrapped up in a welter of strange bedsheets. And if the physicists mean what they say? That with just a few more giant fingers built, just a few centuries more of diligent flicking, we might find out once and for all what\u2019s up with those sheets? What they\u2019re made of, what kind of thread count we\u2019re talking about, in what precise configuration they are tangled about us? Well, all of a sudden that project doesn\u2019t sound so much like a waste of money. Because as anyone who\u2019s ever woken up in that particular situation can tell you, it is only after one has solved the Mystery of the Sheets that one can properly address the bigger questions. Whose house is this. What happened last night. And how the fuck are we supposed to get home.\n\n\n\n  and look here\u2019s the thing...&amp;quot; If so, that only proves my point. I could expand on that a bit, but this is already my third longish footnote, and if you think I\u2019m ending up like poor David Foster Wallace, you can go fuck yourself. _"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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